


Liar, Liar

by xxSparksxx



Series: And Then There Were Two [3]
Category: And Then There Were None (TV 2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-01-23
Packaged: 2018-05-15 17:54:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5794150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xxSparksxx/pseuds/xxSparksxx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wants to hate him. She has never known anybody like him before, somebody who sees right through her lies. He sees right into the heart of her, and she can’t lie to him. He won’t allow her to lie to him, she knows. She’s seen that already. She has been lying all her life, and she wants to hate him for making her peel back the many layers and reveal the inner core.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Liar, Liar

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to mmmuses for beta-reading and picking up all my repetitions. Thanks/blame also to rainpuddle13 for encouragement :P

They have their first fight the night before they are due to depart for the United States.

Vera begins it. Or, rather, it is because of her that they fight. She will acknowledge it later. She will admit that it was irrational of her. But for all that she is an expert liar, she cannot hide her first reaction to reading, on the tickets Philip has procured for them, that he has listed them as Mr and Mrs Lombard.

It is not a drawn-out argument. She demands that he changes it; he tells her he can’t, and that he wouldn’t even if he could. Vera says something scathing, insulting, and Philip retorts in kind. In a red haze of fury, she lifts her hand to slap him. Philip catches her wrist, twists her arm away and for a moment she thinks he will strike her. He looks as though he wants to, his whole body tense, poised to act. He twists her arm a little more, and Vera can’t help crying out from the pain. She isn’t afraid of him. She is too far gone to be afraid of him. But his fierce, unforgiving expression makes her remember how he had shot Wargrave. Without hesitation, he’d done it. His eyes now are like they were then. Dark. Emotionless. He could hit her now, or worse, and she doubted he’d regret it. 

But her pained cry seems to do something to him. He releases her and falls back a step, muttering a curse. Vera holds her throbbing wrist close against her body and turns away from him. It isn’t a good idea, to turn her back on him. A killer, a predator. She does it anyway. Philip curses again. Then she hears footsteps, moving away from her. The door opens, and then slams shut. He’s gone.

They’re in a cheap hotel in Southampton. It is four days since the police declared them both free to go, since Philip asked her to go with him, to leave Britain behind. Shed their skins, like snakes, and find a new life. Together, at least for a while. 

He can’t have gone far, or for long. His suitcase is still here, in a corner next to hers. His revolver is in there, and his passport. He’s got his wallet, but she has the tickets. She isn’t afraid he won’t return, but she is suddenly gripped with the awareness that she has nothing left without him. She has not the slightest _hope_ of escaping the scandal that Soldier Island has tainted her with, not if she stays in Britain. She has no job, no connections, and no family. Few that she could call upon as a friend, none that she trusts in any meaningful way. She has a little money saved, but not enough. Not enough. Without Philip she might as well have died on that island.

But he’ll come back. Sooner or later, he’ll come back. She’ll agree, if he insists, though it makes her feel sick. Sell the lie, make it real, forget that she ever loved anybody enough to want to marry them. A sham marriage to Philip is a small price to pay, and it’s only for the voyage. But it won’t be an easy lie. She can already count a dozen ways it could go wrong.

That isn’t why she objected, of course, but it’s a better reason to give Philip. He’ll come back wanting answers, and it’s not a lie, to say she’s concerned they can’t pull it off. He won’t be able to see through it because there’s nothing to see through.

Her wrist hurts. There were bruises on her arm before, higher up, where he had gripped her too tightly the other day. There will be bruises around her wrist now. She finds a lie to tell anyone who asks, lets it sink into her skin. She doesn’t even have to think about it, the lies come as automatically as breathing. Then she goes to the bathroom and runs a bath. She finds a cigarette, one of his, and smokes it while she’s waiting for the bath to fill. The pipes clang, but at least the water is hot. When the tub is full she stubs out the cigarette, strips bare and sinks into the water.

The other night she had bathed in front of him. She had never done that before, not with Hugo, not with anyone. But Philip has exposed her in so many ways, and this seemed inconsequential compared to the rest. She had undressed, slowly and feeling unusually clumsy. Philip had sat in a chair, watching her, smoking. The smoke had curled around his face at times, hiding him from her. Then, naked, she had climbed into the bathtub and washed. Arms, legs, torso, clinging to routine to avoid any lingering sense of awkwardness. Her hair had been caught up in a bun to keep from getting wet, but that hadn’t helped when Philip had come to kneel beside the tub. He’d touched her then, fingertips ghosting across her body in the water. He’d teased her until she had grasped hold of his hand and forced it where she needed it, where she wanted him. Between her legs, rubbing and pinching and caressing until she fell apart.

She remembers it now, without any flush of arousal but clinically, sorting through the touches and the whispered words to convince herself that one argument won’t drive him from her. Not when he already knows what she is. This is a foolish argument over a fake marriage, nothing more. She’ll give in, if he insists. It’s nothing, after all, _nothing_ , to lie and say that she is his wife. She has told so many lies, lies bigger and more shattering than this, that a sham marriage should be less than nothing.

This isn’t like Hugo.

She takes a breath and bends her knees to submerge her head. She stares up through the water, at the lampshade dangling in the centre of the ceiling. She can smell salt, but she knows it’s in her mind. She knows that well enough by now. She closes her eyes and listens to her heartbeat, loud in her ears underneath the water. She wonders how anybody manages to drown in a bathtub. It happens, she knows. A body can drown in two inches of water, in the right circumstances. She remembers how it felt to drift in the sea, letting the currents drag her. Giving substance to the lie she would tell, of not being a good enough swimmer. She might easily have drowned then. 

Philip is still gone when she leaves the bath. She dries herself quickly and wraps herself in his robe. She’s learned already that he likes seeing her in his clothes. It’s an advantage, wearing his robe. Perhaps she won’t need it, but Vera’s life has taught her to take any advantage she finds. 

There is a bottle of whisky on the dressing table, half-empty. She pours herself a glass. She feels in need of the liquor. She feels cold, though the bath water had been blissfully hot. This cold comes from inside. It’s familiar, and unwelcome. The whisky doesn’t help much, but she drinks it anyway.

She rubs her hair with a towel until it’s dry. It’s late now, nearly midnight, and Philip is still gone. Vera brushes her teeth and packs away her discarded clothes and then climbs into bed. She doesn’t take off Philip’s robe. It’s an advantage, she tells herself again. She wants to believe that’s why she keeps it on, the silk robe that smells of him. She takes the tickets with her, tucks them inside the pillowcase where he can’t take them without disturbing her. He can’t leave without the tickets, or at the very least, without his gun. But she won’t bring _that_ to bed.

Sleep is slow to come, and disturbed. She dreams. It is the first time in four nights that she dreams, and now she dreams that she is on a beach. There is sand beneath her feet, cutting into her skin, the grains as sharp as glass. Hugo is in the sea, but then Hugo is Cyril, waving to her from a boat that seems to be growing further and further away. There are soldiers on the beach, soldiers without faces, and she knows that she should be among them. Eight soldiers with no faces, but all staring at her, all _looking_. Then they start moving, marching to an inaudible beat, coming slowly towards her. Vera tries to run, but the sand cuts her feet and then Philip is there, Philip with his gun. Philip telling her that she should have drowned. She covers her ears with her hands, trying not to hear, but he only gets louder. 

She cries. She has not cried in such a long time, but she cries in her dream. Fat tears roll down her cheeks. The sand is so sharp, stripping skin from the soles of her feet. Philip aims his gun at her and tells her to walk into the sea and drown herself. The soldiers with no faces are marching still, crowding her off the beach. Her feet are so painful. She leaves a trail of bloody footsteps, red-brown on the golden sand. Philip drives her onwards. He tells her to drown herself and she cries, sobs wrenched from her throat without her permission. Not Philip, she thinks, not him too.

She wakes up, still crying. Something is wrapped around her, and she fights against it for a few moments. Then she recognises the voice that’s speaking, and the arms holding her close to a warm torso. It’s Philip, beside her on the bed. His arms around her. His voice, low and soothing, close beside her ear. There is no sand, there are no faceless soldiers. No gun aimed at her head, forcing her into the sea to drown.

“It’s alright, Vera,” he’s saying. “You’re alright now. You’re safe. It’s just me. I told you I’d keep you safe, didn’t I? I’ll keep you safe. Come on, now.” Vera shudders and twists around so she can hide her face against his chest. “You awake?” Philip asks, and she nods. She can’t speak, not yet. Not when the tears are still streaming down her face, when her whole body is shaking from it. Her breath comes in shuddering gasps. “Come on, now,” he says again. “I’ve got you.”

He holds her, more gently than he’s held her since their drunken dance on Soldier Island. They hadn’t drunk as much as Armstrong and Blore. Vera hadn’t touched the drugs. He’d held her close then, his hands gentle on her, murmuring reassurances. They would get away, he’d said. Death isn’t for people like them. Afterwards, in her room, he’d been less gentle. He had kissed her with a kind of tenderness, but his hands had become demanding, stripping her bare and groping at her flesh as if he wanted to do more than just _touch_. He had been taking possession of her, and not merely in that moment. Not merely in a fleeting fever of alcohol and terror. 

Since then it’s been grasping and biting and fingerprints bruised into her arms and legs. They’ve both been too hungry for gentle or tender. Vera likes it that way. She had loved Hugo, still loves him a little despite the shard of ice that he’d plunged into her at the end, but he had at times been too soft. He had not seen that she does not easily break. 

Philip sees her. He sees it all.

Now he’s gentle again. He holds her close to him, strokes her hair and says nothing as her tears wet his bare chest. She’s still shaking. The tears slowly cease, but her breath is still ragged, and she can’t stop shaking. Philip tightens his hold on her a little, as if to try to keep her still. Her teeth are chattering. At last he sighs.

“You need a drink,” he says. He begins to move, to disentangle himself from her, and Vera is ashamed of the needy sound that she makes. She is not needy. She is not that kind of woman. But she doesn’t want him to go, not even for the few moments it will take him to go to the dressing table, pour her a glass of something, and return. Philip cups her face with his hand for a moment, and kisses her forehead. Then he gently pushes her aside so he can rise from the bed.

Vera watches him cross the room to the dressing table. He’s only wearing his briefs. There are marks on his back from her nails, some fading and others more vivid. He pours two glasses of whisky, and brings them both back to the bed. She sits up, feet flat on the bed and knees bent. She dries her face with the sleeve of Philip’s robe. It has slipped off her shoulders, baring skin, but she doesn’t care. When he hands her the glass, she takes it and wraps her free arm around her knees. Like a child, curled up in a semi-foetal position. But she doesn’t feel young. 

Philip leans against the headboard, sips his whisky and rests a hand between her shoulder blades. She’s not sure if he means it that way, but it’s a comforting touch. It grounds her. She exists in this moment, and the past is gone. The past is nothing.

She gulps down the whisky. It burns in her throat, but once she’s emptied her glass she stops shaking, so it serves its purpose. She drops the glass onto the floor and hugs her knees, hiding her face. Philip’s hand is warm and heavy on her back. She takes a deep breath, and another. He says nothing. The silence is not uncomfortable, not at first. Then it stretches out, longer and longer, until Vera thinks she might scream if he doesn’t say something, if he doesn’t ask the questions she’s sure he wants to ask.

But he doesn’t ask. Vera realises that he’s going to wait for her. He’s going to make her speak first. Maybe he wants to see if she’s going to lie to him. He’ll know if she lies. He sees right through her. Perhaps he doesn’t always know what the truth is, beneath the lie, but he sees her lies. He’s seen them right from the start.

Maybe it’s a test. Vera’s breath hitches. She won’t cry again, but there is a scream rising in her throat, choking her. 

Philip seems to sense something. He moves his hand from between her shoulder blades, stroking up and down, like she’s an animal he’s trying to tame. The scream fades away. Vera closes her eyes and breathes deeply. Hugo had seen her and loathed her. Philip sees her, and so far he isn’t disgusted. So far he _likes_ it.

She hasn’t told him the truth about Cyril yet, about Hugo. She hasn’t trusted him enough. She shouldn’t trust him at all, not when she knows what he is, what he’s capable of doing. But so far he’s done nothing to harm her. Or nothing that she hasn’t wanted. She tries to remember another person she’s trusted in her life. Nobody. Not since she was a girl. Not since she’d realised she was different. Even Hugo hadn’t known all of her. Only Philip has seen her differences, recognised it and accepted it. He knows more of her than anyone else in the world. She wants to give him with this, too.

She should lie. She means to lie. When she opens her mouth, she means to tell him that she’d dreamed of Soldier Island and that she doesn’t want to quarrel with him. She should lie to him. 

But she doesn’t.

“On Soldier Island,” she says, “you asked me what it was I wanted. Do you remember?”

“I remember,” Philip murmurs. He keeps stroking her back, up and down, gentle and regular. Like a heartbeat. Like the tide on a beach.

“I wanted Hugo,” Vera whispers. It’s too quiet, and muffled by her knees. Philip doesn’t ask her to repeat herself, but his hand pauses at the base of her spine. “Hugo,” Vera says, lifting her head but not looking at him. “I wanted Hugo. Cyril’s uncle.” She swallows. Philip’s hand moves again. “He suggested I apply for the position, so we could see each other over the holiday. He…if Cyril hadn’t been born, Hugo would have inherited, but he couldn’t…he couldn’t marry without money, he had nothing, and so I…”

She can’t say the words. She can’t say it. She doesn’t regret what she did, not in any way that she _should_ regret it, but she still can’t say the blunt, brutal words. _I let Cyril drown so I could have his uncle_. If Philip tries to make her say it, she doesn’t know what she will do. 

“Did you love him?” Philip asks her. “This Hugo. Did you love him?”

Vera laughs. It isn’t a pleasant sound. “I don’t know,” she says. She had thought it was love, before. But she feels things differently to most people. She has no way of knowing if what she had felt was what others called love. She had wanted him. She had coveted him. She had wanted to be with him for the rest of her life. She had wanted him more than anything. More than anyone. She had wanted him, and the cost had been Cyril’s life, and she had paid it.

She regrets what happened. She regrets that it made Hugo look at her with clear eyes, and that seeing her clearly made him loathe her. She regrets the waste of a life with no gain.

“I thought I did,” she says at last. “But at the end, when he realised what I’d done…he looked at me, and he despised me.”

“Ahh,” says Philip, drawing the sound out. He shifts, behind her on the bed, but his hand never leaves her back. Then he’s close to her, his breath warm against her neck, and his other arm coming around her, his fingers curling lightly around her ankle. She’s almost being held in his embrace. “So that’s why you didn’t like being looked at,” he says. “Miss Claythorne. You’d been burned.”

His hand smoothes up her back, right up to her neck. He slides his fingers into her hair, as if he intends to grip her and tug her head backwards. To expose her vulnerable neck to his predating gaze. But he doesn’t tug. He cups the shape of her skull in his hand and presses a gentle kiss to her shoulder. Vera can’t bear it. It’s too much, his hand at her ankle and his fingers twined in her hair. The gentle press of lips against her bare shoulder. She shudders, and hides her face in her knees again. 

“He saw you,” Philip murmurs, “and he stopped loving you. You wanted to marry him. Marry a spineless thing like that –,”

“Stop it,” Vera demands, her voice a harsh whisper. Philip ignores her. He is relentless, cruel with his words as he had been cruel with his silence.

“I bet he was such a _nice_ boy,” he says, “fresh and young, I bet you had him wrapped around your little finger until he saw the truth. Did he love his nephew? Was that the trouble?” Vera tries to wriggle out of his embrace, but his hold turns hard. He seizes her ankle and grasps a handful of hair, pulling her head up, making her lift her face to meet his eyes. “As if someone like you could ever be happy with someone like that,” he says scornfully. Vera bites her tongue and looks at him. She won’t speak. She won’t give him that. 

After a moment he lets her go. Vera scrambles away from him, off the bed and over to the dressing table. His cigarettes are there. She lights one, drags smoke into her lungs, and says nothing. Philip huffs a quiet laugh, and she watches in the dressing table mirror as he reclines on the bed. Yesterday, or even earlier this evening, she would have enjoyed the sight. She would have found it enticing. Now she just feels tired. 

She wants to hate him. She has never known anybody like him before, somebody who sees right through her lies. He sees right into the heart of her, and she can’t lie to him. He won’t allow her to lie to him, she knows. She’s seen that already. She has been lying all her life, and she wants to hate him for making her peel back the many layers and reveal the inner core. She has always known herself to be flawed. She knows that other people, if they knew her, would call her selfish. Wicked. Evil, even. 

But she can’t hate him, because Vera is torn, always, between what she hears from society and what she knows to be true of herself. And Philip looks at her, and he sees her, and he has not turned away. He has not called her wicked or selfish, or _wrong_.

Her cigarette is half gone by the time Philip moves. He rises from the bed, elegant, cat-like, and closes the space between them. He lights his own cigarette, and leans against the table. His arm brushes against hers. It is deliberate, because all of Philip’s actions are deliberate. Vera doesn’t know if she wants to pull away or to press closer. 

“I can’t change the tickets,” he says. “And I wouldn’t. Your name’s been in the papers, Vera. Same as mine.” Vera nods, and smokes, and says nothing. “We don’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention,” Philip goes on. “Even if people remember my name, they won’t cause trouble. Not just for one of us. But the two of us together…” He trails off. He doesn’t need to say it. Vera can imagine the kind of scenes that could be caused. Not necessarily dangerous scenes, but they’re leaving Britain to escape attention. The last thing they need is to arrive in New York with people already looking at them in suspicion.

“Fine,” she whispers. Mr and Mrs Philip Lombard. She forces herself to build the lie. “I’ll need a ring,” she says. 

“I picked one up this morning at the pawnbroker,” Philip says. It’s about as unromantic as it’s possible to be. Strangely, it makes Vera smile. It seems to fit them, somehow. They had begun on an island surrounded by death, and she has just told him her great secret, and she will pretend to be his wife with a ring from a pawnshop. It’s all wrong. Just like she is.

The papers have only called her ‘Miss Claythorne’, so it will be safe for her to keep her first name. She tries to think what else she needs to weave the lie into the fabric of their existence. A shared history, a shared life together. A recent marriage, but there are things she will need to know, and things he must know. Not too detailed, not too concrete. The best lies, Vera knows, are the ones that don’t come too easily. 

Philip kisses her shoulder. “Vera,” he says softly. “Tell me.” He puts his hand at her waist, just the thin fabric of his robe between his skin and hers. Vera finishes her cigarette, stubs it out in the ashtray. Then she turns her head to look at him. He has that hungry expression again. He wants to hear it all, she sees. He wants to hear how she’ll make the lie believable. He _likes_ her lies. It even excites him. She can see his slightly-enlarged pupils, the way his gaze drops down to her lips and then lower, to the curve of her breasts beneath the robe. It’s late, and she’s tired, but the way he looks at her makes anticipation curl in her belly.

She undoes the robe’s belt, lets the robe slide to the floor, a whisper of silk against her skin. Philip’s hand is on her flesh now, resting on the slight curve of her hip. 

“We’ve not been married long,” she begins. Philip smiles. It isn’t a pleasant expression, not a _nice_ smile. Vera has tried nice before, though, and met only with failure. He’s her match, she reminds herself. He sees her lies and he doesn’t care. He hasn’t gone. He hasn’t left her.

She unfolds the lie, spinning it into existence under his hungry, approving gaze.


End file.
